Nano-surfaces Could Keep the House Clean and Reduce Traffic Accidents

While doing dishes this morning I suddenly realized that a counter top with a surface enhanced with nanotechnology devices could make my life easier.  What if nano-devices embedded in the counter top could recognize food and dirt and distinguish between those substances and the dishes and silverware?   On recognizing food or dirt the nano-devices would synchronously begin moving it, in tiny increments of course, all in the same direction.  The food, dirt, and even bacteria would be passed, bucket-brigade fashion, to one end of the table where they would drop off into a trash receptacle designed for the purpose.  Nano-devices in the counter surface could also detect bacteria and viruses and break their cell walls or otherwise kill them.  Such a technology would have many more applications, however.

Self-Assembly Will Be Important to Many Nanotechnology Products

On December 4, 2009 Scientists at National Physical Laboratory in the UK revealed the world’s smallest snowman and created a youtube video holiday card with it.  It’s a beautiful and funny demonstration of what can be done at sub-visible scales, but also illustrates one of the key problems of nanotech.  To be truly beneficial, nanotechnology must produce results that affect human lives, and it is rare that a single nano-event can do that.  That means nanotechnology devices must be produced in huge quantities for most applications, and that certainly won’t be possible with the techniques that produced the tiny snowman.  That is why a lot of research is being done into molecular self-assembly.

One example is this work being done at The University of Illinois, in which capillary action is used to bend nano-thin silicon in an origami-like process.  Other interesting work on self-assembly is going on also at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, who released an article describing some of their results in this area.  (Wish I had more time to spend on this technology – anyone need a highly skilled project manager with past careers in computer engineering, high tech product development, and technical documentation?)

I dream of paint-on solar cells and other active-coating applications.  The components might be painted on in successive coats, the order of coatings and post-painting treatments with light or heat possibly critical, before the end product, a solar cell for example, would be in place, ready for the connection of electrodes to draw off the power.  I want this for my house, like, yesterday.

Is the “Data Glut” Blurring the Cutting Edge of Scientific Development?

Is there so much data now on the internet that it’s actually becoming harder to find the information you seek? As scientific research continues, the quantity of information (“data glut”) on the internet expands.  Quality of information is another issue.  Will it become increasingly harder to identify and reach the cutting edge in a given field? If the pace of scientific innovation and the accumulation and integration of knowledge continues to accelerate, as Ray Kurzweil suggests, will it reach a point where groups developing different or similar technologies will become incapable of keeping up with each others’ innovations? Will the research efforts of human society become less efficient, with more duplication of efforts, as we go forward? Is this already occurring?

I Hate Lawns

Yes, it’s true. I hate lawns. I didn’t always hate them, though I never particularly liked cutting and maintaining them. (It helped when I was a child and was paid to cut them.)

Is Humanity a Blight on the Face of an Otherwise Beautiful Planet?

To answer this question one must step back, perhaps a long way, from the human-centered concepts we’ve been taught all our lives. Certainly it is natural for any species to experience a runaway population when it achieves some level of ascendency in its environment. But we have evolved to a level where we can see and understand that, as well as what we are doing to the rest of the species on the planet, from microbes to other top predators. Are we smart enough to change our ways, curb our birthrate, preserve what is left of our natural world, and achieve (eventually) a sustainable long term situation that lets us live good lives while sustaining the ability of the other species on whom we symbiotically depend to live good lives as well? Only time will tell, but these ideas deserves both thought and action from each of us.

As always, I welcome your comments. – Tim

Future Cost Increases for Fossil Fuels Will Change Architecture

My new job puts me in a large windowless warehouse-like building, much of which has been turned into office space, cube farms with offices embedded in the walls nearby.  At any given time nobody inside knows if it is raining or if the sun is shining, if it’s day or night.  As in most commercial buildings, the lights and ventilation fans run almost all the time, which seems costly.  One nearby building has a small wind turbine on it that runs a lot of the time, however, and another I see near work has a solar panel on the roof.   All that has made me consider what the buildings of thirty years from now will be like.  Certainly they will be quite different, and I expect the inevitable rise in the cost of fossil fuels, and all energy sources “in sympathy”, to be an important influence on their architecture.  So what will commercial buildings be like in the future?

Ways We Could Scrimp on Energy Today and in the Future

Here I offer a few ideas “off the top of my head” on how we might address our energy (and water) needs in the future, when we can expect to have much higher energy costs and a much greater need to save every bit of energy possible. Some are simple and low cost, and could be implemented now, while others would be economically justified if they were standardized and mass produced at low cost, or when fuel prices become much higher than today. Our population is so great that even a tiny saving becomes great if used by many. I am sure there are many more ideas out there, and welcome your offering them for discussion here. I will add more as I think of or encounter them. The most powerful idea is the last one in the list.

And Hopefully Not More Publication Delays Here …

Life has its challenges. The medical types have discovered several spots on my lungs in CT scans, and one under my armpit, so I may be a bit distracted with medical procedures at times in the near future. That may or may not impede my continued study and writing here. I hope not, but thought I’d mention it. I have another never-read blog at http://timprosserblog.wordpress.com, my old “scratch space” blog, where I have begun journaling the experience. I am staying positive and will continue to think creatively, study, and do my best to inspire myself and others to think and plan ahead in ways that will move the planet toward a sustainable situation with as little human misery as possible.

Thanks for reading, and thinking, and working for a better future for the planet. – Tim

Added July 30, 2008
I feel lucky, though I am not out of the woods completely.  The pulmonologist I saw this morning said the spots on my lungs do not look serious, and many people have them.  He is having me get another CT scan at the end of September and see if anything changes (if not … great … scan again in the future).  He is also sending me to a surgeon for a biopsy of a lump under my arm, so I am knocking on wood that it is just a fatty deposit or something, and not something worse.

Meanwhile, I will keep searching for a job in project management, documentation, quality management, or maybe something with a startup or small company that needs an experienced head with lots of skills to contribute and enough small company experience to have no compunctions about sweeping the floor, if that’s what is needed.  My University of Michigan MBA focused on small organization growth should be a strength, too.

Best regards to all – Tim

Temporary Publication Delays Likely on This Blog

July 17th, 2008, a man came to my desk (at my day job) and took away my desk phone. I asked him if this was management trying to tell me something, and he looked sheepish. He said that he had been given a list of phones to pick up, and didn’t know why. Having been through corporate downsizings a number of times in my multiple careers, I started packing. I was fortunate to be able to make a professional exit, transitioning my work to my supervisor and even saying goodbye to a few colleagues and constituents before the end of the day, when one of my coworkers informed me that he had spoken with my contract employer’s headquarters staff, and they had informally confirmed that I was “on the list”.

Will People Read a Blog That Doesn’t Take Extreme (or Hilarious) Positions?

Is the blogosphere an intellectual desert, or does it just often appear that way?  Surfing the blogosphere, I find my way to a lot of places.  If I just ramble I find a lot of dreck - inscrutable personal journals and obscure personal pursuits, for instance.  Why people make their personal thoughts public is beyond me.  If I concentrate more on finding things that look interesting, I find some extremely funny stuff, and I find childish, extremist rhetoric.  Since my blog fits in none of the above categories, I wonder how it has come to be viewed as often as it is.  Is it just my friends and acquaintances coming to visit? 

Preserving (Spoiled) North American Attitudes about Personal Transportation

An esteemed colleague and friend, John Herbst, suggested to me the application of electromagnets for saving fuel on the freeway.  John and I both commute about 35 miles to work each day, each driving a car that gets over 30 mpg, but feeling a longing to be much less wasteful.  We have discussed the impracticality of taking a train, especially with regard to how we would get from the train station to where we work.  I was describing a favorite part of one of my all-time favorite science fiction novels, Snow Crash, in which the pizza delivery guy travels on a future-tech skateboard using a magnetic lariat to get pulled down the street by passing cars.  John immediately said that he’s always wanted to have a big magnet on the front of his car so that, once he was on the highway, he could stick his car to the back of a passing truck, shut off the engine, and be pulled to near work, at which point he could disconnect from the truck and drive his car the rest of the way. 

Be Wary of the Quality of On-line Information Sources

The range of information sources on the web is broad, and I run across some interesting variations when I research things I’m interested in. Recently I ran across a site that purports to provide answers to almost any question, a laudable ambition, and suddenly I understood where some of those spam “work at home and earn big money” ads are coming from.

The Blogger’s Problem – the “Keyhole Effect”

The “keyhole problem” is a common issue for bloggers.  A blog is influenced heavily by not only the world-view of the writer, but by the phenomenon of “looking at the world through a keyhole”. There is almost always a lot more information, from a broader range of sources and viewpoints, than one can cover and still write productively, so one must accept that you can only “look through a keyhole” at the world.  Here is how I attempt to handle this problem.

How Long Can Technological Advancement Keep Speeding Up?

Attempting to predict where technology may take us in future decades, and how quickly, is a fun and challenging undertaking. A lot of the science fiction-y sounding ideas I and others have come up with are exciting, but I doubt we can expect to see progress much more rapid than was seen with the advent of radio, for example. Much as we’d like to think that technological progress is increasing exponentially and new inventions will appear more and more quickly to save our ecological “bacon”, Ray Kurzweil’s ideas notwithstanding (link), I believe it is unlikely to happen like that. While scientific progress will continue, the human limitations around how quickly we can learn, and how quickly we are willing to adopt new ideas and tools, will ensure that our advancement will not be truly exponential.

The Press Needs a More Holistic Approach to Sustainability

Yesterday I heard a great article on NPR (National Public Radio) about the factors that will affect how long our fossil fuels last, and that, in spite of projections that would direct otherwise, our industry continues to be heavily addicted to fossil fuels.  I was extremely pleased that they acknowledged that, at some point, our fossil fuel resources will effectively run out, that is, will become so expensive due to scarcity and increased difficulty of extraction that we won’t be able to use them as we do now.  Unfortunately, they failed to cite an underlying factor that probably has more impact on our future, including how long our fossil fuels last, than anything else: population.  It is certain that, if population growth slows, fossil fuels will last longer.  The problem is that fossil fuels, like pollution or climate change, aren’t the whole story.